My Penny's Worth
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November 9, 2016—I offer my thoughts about the election for a penny,
discounting 50 percent from the usual two-cents worth. I don’t feel as if I am in a position to demand
full price. Although I was not the only one confidently predicting a Clinton victory for the last several
months, it seems to me that all of us who were making that prediction need to give ourselves a
reality-check based on the actual result. I remember having a similar sense, of the need for a critical
self-reflection, last time I was stunned by the outcome of an election—in 1990, when the Sandinistas were
defeated in Nicaragua. Tuesday night shook my world with a similar force. If others are honest I
think you will acknowledge something similar.
At the same time, I tend to think that I may be even more in need of a
critical re-examination of assumptions than others, because my prognostications
were based on a deeper analysis than just the published opinion polls. The
published opinion polls fooled many. But my thinking was rooted in expectations
about how bourgeois politics in the USA actually work: that there is a ruling
class which, in its substantial majority, wanted Hillary Clinton to be elected
president. The ruling class, I believed, would therefore do whatever was
necessary to defeat Trump and give Clinton the victory. Indeed, this seemed to
be precisely what was happening in early October when the Washington
Post published its revelations about Trump groping women. “Yes,” I said to
myself, and to others. “The world is working just the way we expect that it
ought to work.”
But then it didn’t.
Commentaries on the election from a left perspective have begun to appear.
Most of them that I have seen say useful things about the deep anger of ordinary
people and the failures of the Democratic Party. Such elements are, certainly, a
factor in the vote. But these specific aspects should, also,
have been obvious in the weeks and months leading up to November 8. Their
effects should have been registered in the polls. Why, then, did so many of us
get it wrong? Why did the polls get it wrong? That is the deeper question that I
think it’s important for us to ponder.
The only compensation I have for being so smug over the last several months
was that the ruling class elements who wanted to guarantee Clinton’s victory
were likewise feeling smug. They thought they had done what
they needed to do to achieve their goal. They were fooled by the same polls that
fooled the rest of us. My thinking about ruling-class intentions wasn’t wrong.
What was wrong was that both I and the ruling class severely underestimated what
was needed to defeat Trump and ensure a Clinton victory.
Let me suggest that one thing ought to be clear at this point: Trump’s
victory did not take place because elements of the radical/revolutionary left
failed to rally around a vote for Clinton. The fundamental causes were far more
significant than that. What were those causes? Why did they remain so deeply
hidden in the weeks and months leading up to election day? I do not pretend that
I can give a full explanation, but I do want to share some thoughts, hoping to
make a contribution to the broader conversation we obviously need to have.
Specifically, I want to share a personal observation which, I think, has some
relevance.
I spent four days, starting last Saturday, travelling through rural
Pennsylvania (visiting five prisoners in three state prisons in those four days)
arriving back home Tuesday evening—in time to cast my vote for Jill Stein. This
was Trump-Pence country. So it wasn’t particularly surprising, or alarming, to
see lawn sign after lawn sign promoting the Trump ticket as I travelled. I have
to admit that I was a bit surprised on Tuesday morning (election day) when in a
stretch of less than 30 miles I passed two small groups of enthusiastic
Trump supporters (all white males in both groups) cheering and waving
signs. Well, OK, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised at that either.
Then, this morning, as I was driving to Long Island from Brooklyn for a job
in the wake of the vote, trying to come to terms with what had happened, I was
struck by something else. Here I am, living in New York City, the heart of
Clinton country. As I looked at the other cars on the road, however, I realized
that there was not even one sporting a Hillary Clinton bumper sticker. Since
most residents of NYC do not have lawns, this is the equivalent of the lawn
signs in rural Pennsylvania, which were so numerous. (Most residents of NYC
probably don’t have cars either. But the lack of bumper stickers still seems
like a meaningful measure. Back in 2012, and before that in 2008, you would see
Obama bumper stickers everywhere as you travelled in and around the city.)
What does this signify? I think it gives us a hint about why things turned
out the way they did, and why the forces at work weren’t visible on the surface.
It is surely the case that many (most?) voters in this election cast their
ballots for one candidate or the other because they wanted to defeat the
opposing candidate, not because they particularly wanted to support the person
they voted for. But it is also true that both candidates had a core group of
dedicated supporters. Trump’s dedicated supporters were, I think, more
enthusiastic than Clinton’s—if we judge by what I will term “lawn sign
consciousness” or “bumper-sticker consciousness.” Trump’s message resonated
actively with a layer of privileged white voters, who understood that “Make
America Great Again” meant “recapture the dominance and privileges you
enjoyed when the USA was the undisputed economic, military, and political power
in the world.” These were surely the types who participated in the road-side
rallies I witnessed on election day.
What similar appeal did Clinton have for anyone? She was, clearly, a
candidate about whom very, very few were truly enthusiastic, even her core
supporters. She did not generate much enthusiasm from her most obvious natural
constituency, women, among whom she polled no better than Obama did four years
ago.
I would like to suggest that this element—the level of enthusiasm for the
respective candidates—would have been hard to measure in opinion polls leading
up to November 8. It was probably one (at least one) of the invisible forces at
work, no doubt affecting the relative turnout of Trump’s and Clinton’s core
constituencies at the polls in key states. And for anyone who had a deeply
positive, gut-level response to Trump’s pro-empire message, including women, all
of the scandals and misogyny would be of strictly secondary importance. Thus the
ruling-class strategy did not have the effect I and they both expected.
I heard
one commentator say some weeks ago that Trump was the only Republican candidate
that Clinton could expect to defeat. It was probably also true that Clinton was
the only Democratic candidate that Trump might have defeated. I assert that the
lack of even a “bumper-sticker” consciousness in support of Clinton, in a city
like New York, sheds some light on the reason why. Of course in NY it didn’t
matter. But in key states that Trump carried and that Clinton might have, this
is probably one element that contributed to the outcome.
In
any case here we are, and the obvious conclusion is the same as it would have
been had Clinton won. All the commentaries from the left take the same approach:
We will need to mobilize a genuine people-power alternative if we want anything
good to happen in the next four years.
I
do believe that now, having so badly miscalculated in the election itself, those
elements of the US ruling class which wanted a Clinton victory will use every
lever they have—most obviously in Congress—to make sure that the most
destructive (for them) potential of a Trump presidency does not come to pass.
Here it is noteworthy that the establishment leaders of the Republican Party
remain in opposition to Trump’s program on key questions. Still, this is of
small comfort to people like us, since the programmatic points on which Trump
and the Republican establishment do agree (along with most of the Democrats in
Congress on many of the same questions) are hardly intended to serve the
interests of the 99 percent.
So
the key variable will surely be how mass movements like Black Lives Matter, or
for immigrant rights, or against ecological destruction, or organized labor
react to these events. What strategy do those who want to prevent any further
erosion of abortion rights choose to follow?
Along the same line here is one final thought for your penny:
Jacobin, in its editorial comment on the election says: “it’s horrifying to contemplate the ways that
[Trump’s] triumph will serve to strengthen the cruelest and most bigoted forces
in American society.”
Maybe.
But I’m inclined to think that this effect will be no more significant than the
supposed new era of improved racial consciousness and race relations that was
predicted by so many as a result of Obama’s victory in 2008. These kinds of
realities tend to be influenced by the movement of big social forces. They can
be measured by election results, but the election results themselves don’t
usually move the meter much one way or the other—not even the victory of Donald
Trump. True, we can expect those in the Alt-right and KKK to
try to take advantage of a Trump presidency, thinking that what has
happened will put those of us who are prepared to mobilize against racism on the
defensive. Whether they succeed, however, depends primarily on how those of us
who are inclined to mobilize against racism respond to what has just taken
place.
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